Sunday, November 9, 2014

Lesson 62 - Basic Basic

Today I refreshed my Commodore 64 programming skills by reading the C64 Wiki. Meanwhile my daughter was playing some games on the net. It took just a little while to for her attention to switch to what I was doing. I guess the animated bird was the selling point. A fun thing about the Commodore Basic is that if you want a delay, you do it with a for-loop: FOR X=1 TO 300:NEXT

Anyway, she wanted to change my "waves" program to one that would print her name all around the screen. It took a sec to get used to the way programs are edited on this old machine. For instance, you always edit in the overwrite mode. And you have only 2 arrow keys, so that you have to the SHIFT key to be able to move to all directions.Yet, she made it! So her first BASIC program looks like this.

In case you wonder what the semicolon does, it prevents the otherwise automatic line-feed.And managed to save it too. Now she's looking for the disc that says "Bubble Bubble".